I’ve written many times before about the importance of promoting O.R. to the general public. One of the ideas that’s been suggested by several people is the possibility of writing a work of fiction whose main character (our hero) is an O.R./Analytics person. I still believe this is a great idea, if executed properly.

Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The contest (hereafter referred to as the BLFC) was the brainchild (or Rosemary’s baby) of Professor Scott Rice, whose graduate school excavations unearthed the source of the line “It was a dark and stormy night.” Sentenced to write a seminar paper on a minor Victorian novelist, he chose the man with the funny hyphenated name, Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who was best known for perpetrating The Last Days of Pompeii, Eugene Aram, Rienzi, The Caxtons, The Coming Race, and – not least – Paul Clifford, whose famous opener has been plagiarized repeatedly by the cartoon beagle Snoopy. No less impressively, Lytton coined phrases that have become common parlance in our language: “the pen is mightier than the sword,” “the great unwashed,” and “the almighty dollar” (the latter from The Coming Race, now available from Broadview Press).

Just like an awful first sentence can be a good indicator of a terrible book, the converse can also be true. Take, for example, the first sentence of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, which I happen to be reading (and loving) as we speak:

The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.

It’s such a strong, mysterious, and captivating sentence…

…which brings me to the point of this post. If it’s going to be difficult to write The Great Analytics Novel, what if we start by thinking about what would be the perfect, most compelling sentence to start such a novel? Yes, I propose a contest. Let’s use our artistic abilities and suggest starting sentences. Feel free to add them as comments to this post. Who knows? Maybe someone will get inspired and start writing the novel.

Here’s mine:

Upon using the word “mathematical” he knew he had lost the battle for, despite the dramatic cost savings, their logical reasoning was instantly halted, like a snowshoe hare frozen in fear of its chief predator: the Canada lynx.